A quietly dramatic novel, ‘Deep Water’ thrusts questions forward, and I found myself asking ‘what would I do?’ as I read. Several interlinked stories weave their through and around a clinical trial into obesity, and the search for a cure for a rare blood disorder. Daniel, a lawyer specialising in patents, and his wife Rachel, have opposing thoughts on the morality of a potential cure for their daughter, while researcher Katie finds suspicious incidents mounting up at the laboratory where she works. This is a fairly short novel, yet Christine Poulson ensures the clear, concise writing style still paints a vivid picture. It really does feel as though this could be a real situation, yet there is a subtly intensity to the storyline. ‘Deep Water’ prods and provokes, it highlights issues, yet still is a tense and captivating tale. ~ Liz Robinson
A cure for obesity, worth billions. A death in a clinical trial. When patent lawyer Daniel Marchmont agrees to act for Calliope Biotech, he doesn't know what he's getting into. The first lawyer on the case is dead, and a vital lab book is missing. Daniel and his wife Rachel are hoping biotechnology will also provide a cure for their daughter Chloe, who suffers from a devastating genetic disorder. Then the unimaginable happens, and they face a moral dilemma that threatens everything. Meanwhile young researcher Katie Flanagan suspects something is very wrong in the lab. But knowledge is dangerous when someone is playing a perilous game...
Before Christine Poulson turned to crime, she was a respectable academic with a PhD in History of Art and had written widely on nineteenth-century art and literature. During her career as an art historian, she worked as a curator of ceramics at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and as curator for the William Morris Society at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, London. She taught for the Open University and was a lecturer in Art History at a college in Cambridge. The city of Cambridge and the surrounding Fens, with their unique, sometimes sinister atmosphere, provided the setting for her first novel and she was spurred on by her own experience of being made redundant. Her most recent work of non-fiction, a book on Arthurian legend in British Art,1840-1920, was short listed for a Mythopoeic Award in the USA in 2002.
